Could future wars be fought by AI?

In February 2025, a senior Pentagon official named Cameron Stanley gave a live demonstration of Palantir’s Maven Smart System, an AI platform now being integrated into U.S. military operations. "Right click, left click, magically, it becomes a detection," he said. "That detection then gets moved into a workflow. So we’ve gone from identifying the target to now coming up with a course of action to now actioning that target closing a kill chain." The pitch is straightforward: let AI handle the drudgery of surveillance, target identification, and even suggesting attack plans, making war faster, more efficient, and theoretically lower-risk. Just months later, the Department of Defense signed agreements with eight AI companies—including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google—to accelerate the transformation toward an "AI first fighting force." The technology is already being deployed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s Claude tool to assist with operations capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Maven Smart System has been used in campaigns in Iran. The Israeli Defense Forces have their own AI tools, Lavender and Gospel, used to support operations in Gaza. But what does it actually mean to put AI in the loop of war? And what happens when the machines start making choices humans wouldn't?

Decision support, not decision making—yet